It’s a bit complicated to install, but once you get is installed, it runs smoothly.

There’s a pretty complete guide provided which explains how to install the whole thing.

I bought this program a while back and tried to install it on a domain for test.

After following the detailed steps in the guide, the Fata error I got was:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare hash_update() in /home/*****/public_html/****/hivemail/includes/functions.php on line 58

Well, after a lot of research, the last solution was to comment out the whole “hash_update()” function in the “functions.php” file.

To comment out this function, just open the “functions.php” file which is located in “includes” folder under Hivemail root, and find : function hash_update(… and add double slashes ” // ” on the begining of each line of the function.

That solves this error and you can continue the installation.

After having installed the program, I used the PIPE method for the email gateway and everything seemed to be OK.

But when I tried to send emails to my hivemail address; the emails were getting bounced back. and the message said:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

pipe to |/home/****/hivemail_process.php
generated by administrator@MyDomain.com
local delivery failed

The following text was generated during the delivery attempt:

—— pipe to |/home/****/hivemail_process.php
generated by administrator@MyDomain.com ——

Error in argument 1, char 3: option not found
Usage: php [-q] [-h] [-s] [-v] [-i] [-f <file>]
php <file> [args...]
-a              Run interactively
-C              Do not chdir to the script’s directory
-c <path>|<file> Look for php.ini file in this directory
-n              No php.ini file will be used
-d foo[=bar]    Define INI entry foo with value ‘bar’
-e              Generate extended information for debugger/profiler
-f <file>        Parse <file>.  Implies `-q’
-h              This help
-i              PHP information
-l              Syntax check only (lint)
-m              Show compiled in modules
-q              Quiet-mode.  Suppress HTTP Header output.
-s              Display colour syntax highlighted source.
-v              Version number
-w              Display source with stripped comments and whitespace.
-z <file>        Load Zend extension <file>.

—— This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ——

I could send emails FROM the hivemail program, but I was not able to recieve any mails.

After Googling a while, here’s the solution I found, and IT WORKS!!

on hivemail install guide it says:
“Next, you will need to set the default address for your domain, so
all email not sent to known POP3 accounts is routed to HiveMail?. To
do this, login to cPanel and click the ‘Mail’ link from the main
page. Click ‘Default Address’ on the resulting page. Then click ‘Set
Default Address’.
On the next page, choose the domain that you wish to route HiveMail?
emails from. (Usually, you will want to set this to yourdomain.com,
unless you are planning to offer email@subdomain.yourdomain.com or
something similar.)
Type a pipe (the | character) followed by the to the
hivemail_process.php file that you uploaded above, so it looks
similar to this:
|/home/mysite/hivemail_process.php”)

but in fact you need to do |/usr/bin/php -q /path/to/your/hivemail_process.php

So, after installing, you may want to add some skins, to do so; create a “skins” folder inside you hivemail installation root and upload each skin’s folder there, and in the admin control panel, go to skin manager and import the “.skn” file.

That’s all about how to install and run HiveMail. If you need more information, don’t hesitate to post in the comments.

More is available on www.Hive2.com

Today I found out that Wordpress 2.6 has been released and immediately upgraded GIbni.com.

The first new feature I saw in my Dashboard, is the “Turbo”, at the top right corner of the page. What Turbo does is that it uses Google’s new technology, called Gears, to accelerate the website and make pages and content load faster. This requires Google Gears to be installed on your browser. Well, this takes almost no time to install, and helps a lot in accelerating the site.

The next one, is the small red balloon number on top of “Plugins” link, which shows how many plugins are active.

Here’s a Video tour on Wordpress 2.6:

Here’s what’s new in Wordpress 2.6: (Source : http://Wordpress.org )

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the in_category() function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

When a regular visitor or commentator finds a useful article/discovery/discussion/photo/joke or what ever (s)he finds interesting which is not published somewhere else; (s)he can ask that his/her discovery be published with his/her name mentioned on Gibni.com, and (s)he can even get the article/post ready him/herself with all references and links and media.

To ask for a Post-On-Demand, what you have to do is just contact me and let me know about what you found interesting. Just check that your topic is not published somewhere else. And please avoid spam.

To contact for a POD, go to the contact page.

Thank you.

Dr. Masoud Moradi, University Professor of History, in Iran, a dear visitor of Gibni; recently contacted me and asked for a Post-On-Demand. He got two pictures from a very ancient stone engraving near his birth town, Birjand in Iran. After researches he made, the drawing dates from the Achaemenid Empire (550 BC–330 BC) period in Ancient persia.

In the photo you can see a man struggling with a lion and on the top, there are some writings that are not yet decoded by today’s specialists.

The Title of this engraving is: “Parthi’s fighter against lion”. Parthi is the name of a Persian Ethnic.

More about Parthians (by Dr. M. Moradi): they are an Arian group who fight against Soloukid,  their dynasty expanded in Iranian plateau for more than four hundred years.

Here are some links he provided me, to get more information, just follow these links:

http://www.iranchamber.com/people/articles/iranian_ethnic_groups.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_of_the_Parthian_empire

http://www.parthia.com/parthia_history.htm

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/662633/Parthian

Unfortunately, we see that there’re unrespectable people who wrote their initials on this historical monument which is a great piece of ancient history and belongs to the history of our world!

I’m really happy and excited to get the opportunity to put this photos on Gibni, as it seems to be a discovery which is published exclusively on GIBNI.COM!!!

Multi-Browser, Multi-Platform Compatibility:

A well made website is a website that is showing well in different types of browsers, i.e. when you open it in Firefox, it should look as well as it might look in Opera or Internet Explorer; this is a Multi-Browser compatible site.

A website that can adapt its look and functionalities to the platform it is visited from is a multi-platform website. As example, if you browse Gibni from your mobile device, you’ll get a page that is adapted for the device you’re using, and not the full version you get on your PC’s (or MAC’s) browser! That makes is just EASIER for you to access Gibni from a mobile device and navigate easily on it.

When designing a website you should ALWAYS keep these aspects in mind.

Sometimes this might be the most difficult part of designing a website as different browsers have different behaviours with the same code!

The look, The Design:

The look of your website, makes it unique, so use your creativity and search around for good designs to get new ideas, mix and remix them, and find a good design to make for your website. We’ll discuss this topic in a seperate post as it takes time and is a special topic.

Currentl Gibni’s look is a unique design made from my imagination and mixing other unique ideas together. The upcoming release is a different design, but still UNIQUE!

Tools and Software to use:

Making the design, editing images:

To make the design and also images you want to use, you need to have a good image editor software; best choice is ADOBE PHOTOSHOP. It’s not the easiest thing to learn, but once you get into it, you’ll have the best tool to make and remake and optimize graphic designs and images. I use Photoshop to do every image editing job. It’s the best and most complete solution.

Writing the code:

To design a Wordpress theme, we need a software to write the PHP code with, you can simply use NOTEPAD, but that is a very thought way to choose!

I personally use ADOBE DREAMWEAVER, as it is very robust and easy to use, and EXTREMELY professional. There are extensions which simply inserting wordpress functions. But I didn’t use these extensions because they get me confused sometimes.

Testing:

To test localy what you are making, you will need to have a local server. That might sound difficult, but ChSoftware made a VERY useful PORTABLE WEB SERVER that you download and just run! no need for installation, no complicated configuration. In WOS II (by ChSoftware), there are a lot of packages you can use, as phpMyAdmin, Wordpress, MySQL, PHP 4, PHP 5 and a lot more. Just visit their website, download WOS and run it on your PC. Instructions are clear and easy to understand on their website and in the software itself.

Browser:

I recommend that you use at least two browsers (Internet Explorer and Firefox) to test your code and design.

Host:

To host your website, either it is a blog or a CMS or an E-commerce website, you should choose the best hosting company that you can afford. I actually use LunarPages, as my hosting. They provide me avery good customer support and they offer very interesting plans, either for begginers or for professionals who need dedicated servers. The server response time is a fairly good one and scripts run very smoothly on their servers. The best thing is that THEY CARE ABOUT YOU! an exaple is that a long back, they got a problem with a hardware and their server went down for few hours, I contacted them and asked for help, I got a reply in the following hour and the problem got solved very quickly; the next day I got a phone call from Lunarpages customer service, the guy apologized for the problem and offered me a free month of hosting to show their good will! I was shocked and happy! firstly to get a month of free hosting and secondly to be with a hosting company that cares about its customers!!

Anyway, try to look for the best one you can afford, and check the availability of everything you will need before paying the host.

If you want to get a good offer from Lunarpages, click this link and make your purchase by following this link: Lunarpages.com - From Gibni

In next posts we’ll see how to start the work!

Detailed posts about the currently discussed topics will be available on Gibni, so I recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feeds.

All comments are welcomed

I’ve started to redesign and remake Gibni’s theme. As Gibni’s main technology relies on Wordpress, MySQL and PHP, so this post might be useful for many bloggers and for almost every theme designer.

User Friendly:

A lot of readers and visitors complain about Gibni being confusing and they say that they’re “lost”! I agree that the current look is full of information and users might get tiered reading pages. As this is a HUGE drawback a site can have, I’m trying to make the new theme look clean and net and though it will have a bundle of info and widgets and also be monetized; it should be easy to read and very user friendly.

Search Engine Optimization:

So far, the current theme which is Prince Theme v1.0, is very reliable and stable. But better than that, it is very well Search Engine Optimized. The current SEO score till date is 97% SEO, based on www.Domaintools.com SEO Calculator.

The new theme will be also optimized to the maximum and I am trying to make the keywords density and relativity increase. I thought of a technique to show a special output for search engine spiders and bots, but I’m studying the impact on loading speeds.

Monetized:

The current version (v1.0) is monetized with Adsense, Kontera, PepperJamNetwork and few affiliates.

Main issue here is that ads take a huge amount of space and on the other side make the pages look ugly sometimes. My goal is to try making ads camouflaged and prevent them from disturbing the reader as well as providing the visitors relative ads based on the content they’re viewing. For this, firstly I’ll need to choose an efficient way to keyword the pages and posts and more important, to put the right ads on the right places!
Loading Times:

I call “Loading time” the time a page takes to load on a visitors browser. You may have noticed that Gibni loads pretty fast the first time you visit (with an empty cache) and after that it load EXTREMELY fast! Well, I actually use advanced caching and data loading technologies that not all designers know about. I’ll explain these technologies in a seperate post. What I aim at now is to make pages load even faster than now and make caches more reliable and load important content FIRST, to not keep the visitor waiting for what (s)he is searching for to appear!

In next parts we’ll talk about the look, the code, testing, browser compatibility…

Detailed posts about the currently discussed topics will be available on Gibni, so I recommend that you subscribe to the RSS feeds.

All comments are welcomed.

Today I purchased the All-in-One printer, which does also scanning and copying and has got card reader and an LCD for printing right from a memory card.

Easy to Use:

The Epson DX8450 is a very beautiful and well design printer. It’s really easy to install and to use. To start using it, i had just to put in the ink and it’s ready to go. But you should be careful to install the drivers and required software BEFORE connecting the printer to your computer.

Seperate inks:

The big advantage about it is that it had got seperate inks, that is each color has got it’s own cartridge, and whenever one gets over, I won’t need to change all of them.

Plus on the running costs, it’s a very cost effective printer, as each of the original ink would cost me around 8 to 10 Euros, which is quite an interesting price.

Print Speed and Quality:

The DX8450 is a quite fast and has very high quality for printing. It prints very nice photos (on special photo paper) and perfect quality for normal document printing.

I will test the Transfer printing in the next few days, and post some photos of the t-shirts i’ll be creating with.

Noise:

This is a quite low noise printer. Although I won’t say it’s the perfect one, but it’s a lot more quite than other brands and models I’ve seen on the market within the same price range.

Inks for Epson Stylus DX8450:

Are you worried about the inks and their costs? Don’t worry, I checked the prices and compared them to the other brands and in the long run, the epson inks will be cheaper for you than any other ones.

There are also “Compatible” inks, that cost less, but would “a bit” decrease the print quality. So even if you’re thinking about compatible inks, the DX8450 is still the best choice.

Price:

The price of this printer will depend on the country you purchase it from, but it usually ranges from 90 to 100 Euros ( 135 - 150 USD)

Just drop in your local computer store and ask them about DX8450!

Buy The Epson Stylus DX8450:

If can’t get one in your local store, You can buy one here on Gibni.com! To buy it from me, you have to take in account the shipping costs, but the price for a NEW Epson Stylus DX8450 will be 85Euros, and this offer is to promote my website!

So, don’t hesitate!